cold shower therapy

[Guest guest]

I have seen this article on cold showers elsewhere, but you may be interested.

 

I just took a look at the archives. There are several pages of emails. This

may be the most talked about specific subject. The archives are an amazing

resource.

 

To whet your appetite.....

This is in the rough, direct dialect of early Yogiji. (Yogi Bhajan)

You must read between the lines.

Sat Nam,

Dharam

 

Ishnaan, the Science of Hydrotherapy

 

I'd like to share the technology and science of a type of massage with you.

It is called hydrotherapeutical massage. As I'm sitting before you, my first

qualification and field of expertise is in hydrotherapy. You may not have

known that, and there is no one else with this qualification in the whole

world. I carry the lineage of those who now are very unknown, but who once

were worshipped. They worked on the bones, adjusted the body and did massage

to recreate healthy organs.

 

Since ancient times, people have prayed for the blessing of Ishnaan. What is

ishnaan? Ishnaan is the total sum of hydrotherapy. The word is ishnaan. We

don't say we'll take a bath; we never say "bath." Ishnaan is when the body

by its own virtue creates the temperature that it can beat off the coldness

of the water. Ishnaan is not just wetting your body. There is a whole

respect to it. There is a whole grace to it.

 

 

The power of water is sixty percent of the power of the human. In

hydrotherapy we believe that the sixty percent water in the body can be

totally exchanged in sixty minutes with outside water. We do ice cold water

massage and not only do we open up the capillaries, but then when they close

down again, that is, return to normal, that blood goes back to the organs.

The heart, kidneys, lungs, liver-each organ has its own blood supply. In

this way the organs get their flushing. When the organs get a flushing, then

immediately the glands have to change their secretion. It is a law. And when

the glands change, the guardians of the health and life change, youth

returns. What is youth? Young glands. Young glands are called youth. If your

glandular system secretes correctly the blood chemistry is a young

chemistry, and the glands can be made to do it. All this neurotic neurosis

and smartness will all be over...

 

 

This science of hydrotherapy is very precise and sophisticated, and very

simple. If you take a cold shower and let it fall just below the lower lip

for ten or fifteen minutes, you will be bright and your mind will be very

clear. If you put the water between the eyebrows and the upper lip, you will

be very energetic. And if you put the water on the forehead, you will be so

sleepy that you can't match it. If you massage the upper arm under a very

cold shower from your elbow to just below your shoulder on your upper arm,

you are totally curing your stomach. From your elbow to about two inches

above your wrist corresponds to your digestive tract. Two inches above the

wrist to the start of the wrist corresponds to your heart. The wrist

corresponds to your liver and the fingertips correspond to your brain.

 

 

Then if you put the water on your neck in the front and let the water run

down your entire body and hands, you will totally change all your cells. And

if you let the water hit your chest and go all the way down to your genitals

and you stay under it for a while, you are totally changing the chemistry of

the blood from unhealthy to healthy. If you let the water hit your feet and

massage the right foot with the left foot, and the left foot with the right

foot, you are actually massaging your entire body. Stand before a cold

shower and massage your feet and your calves by yourself. Use your feet to

massage, don't use your hands. Then stand away from the water and using both

hands, massage your entire body and let the body get hot. Then take a cold

shower again and massage your body again. Do that for about twelve to

fifteen minutes. You should have a friend handy to pull you out. You will be

in a totally different space.

 

 

Your body will be totally rebuilt. Each organ will be rebuilt. How? When you

take a cold shower, your blood rushes out to meet the challenge. This means

all the capillaries open up and all deposits have to go. Everything is

cleaned; it is a very cleansing process. During hydrotherapy, the body is

challenged by the cold water and by massaging the body, it can meet this

challenge and not feel cold.

 

 

Do you understand this? When you are under the cold shower, your body will

feel the cold, right? But when the blood and the capillaries are totally

opened up to the maximum, the body will not feel cold. I repeat, it will not

feel cold. And if you bring your body to that temperature where it can meet

the cold by its own circulatory power, then all you have to do is come out

and totally towel yourself, put on warm clothes, and put a blanket around

you. Or if it is hot weather like it is here, use a big bath towel.

 

 

Bath towels are like blankets. Roll yourself up in one. Then your body will

become wild hot. All the blood that is in the capillaries and in circulation

will go back to the organs: the kidneys, the liver, the spleen, the

lungs-because each part of your body lives on its own blood supply which is

regulated by the beat of the heart. So the organs will get a rich supply of

blood like a crop getting a beautiful rain, and then the crop grows up. In

exactly the same way, this is how you can balance your health.

 

They didn't know how to make a shower when they first did hydrotherapy. You

are very lucky you have modern showers. In ancient times there was nothing.

They had to fill a tub that was about thirty to forty feet above the ground.

It was huge and men had to fill it with water. It required many men to

create enough water pressure for the hydrotherapy. When the machine age came

they used a booster pump to create that effect. Have you ever taken a bath

under a booster shower? It's fun. They take a pump that has a booster, which

comes through the showerhead. It is so powerful, so wonderful; it's

marvelous. We used to have a handle and a pipe and the pipe was flexible.

For somebody who lay down under it, it had a tremendously soothing effect.

 

Now we have showers in every house, but the art of hydrotherapy is lost. Now

a little pill can help you, and you can be on your own again. That is fine,

but the difference between people today and people then is that today people

want to be healthy, but they are not afraid of being sick. In those days,

people were afraid of being sick; they never wanted to be unhealthy. That is

how times have changed for us; that's what we are. Allopathic medicine is

very effective. The chemical goes right in, right to the spot and it takes

care of you. But the unfortunate part of it is that it has its side effects.

 

Body cells recuperate themselves in seventy-two hours. Sometimes they get

delayed. Recuperation becomes slower as you become older; it's the time

phase. But in hydrotherapy we believe youth is permanent, and youth is

permanent not because it's God's gift. Youth is permanent because we know

how to be young. It's a challenge but people who have done hydrotherapy have

seen that they have remained young by their own virtue. I myself have seen

my teacher, Sant Hazara Singh, remain ageless, so long as he did it.

 

By doing any exercise for hours, you cannot stimulate your cell psyche to

the extent that you can with cold water. And the procedure is very simple.

Take your hands, let the cold water fall, and rub them to the extent that

they become hot under the ice cold water. And so with every part of the

body; let it go, let it be, and stimulate yourself. And this stimulation may

look to you like a fanatic, painful attitude, but that's what it is all

about. Some people do deep muscle massage, some people go to spas, and

others do this or that. There are one million methods and nothing even comes

close to this one. There's nothing like standing under ice cold water and

making your body become hot. The word is "hot." Normally, in this therapy,

we say to "heat yourself,"- heat your neck, heat your shoulders, heat your

elbows. Can you believe a guy standing under a shower doing this for two

hours? But that's how they do it. And everywhere that the cold water hits,

the blood will come. Everywhere you massage, rebuilding will occur and the

psyche of each cell of the body will be reconstructed.

 

Sometimes in your own life, you do not value your life. And then you cannot

value it, because you are old. So play no such games with yourself; death

will come, don't bother. Richness will come, don't bother. Poverty will

come, no bother. Disease will come, no bother. Bother for nothing. But, if

you have a strong-built mind, body and soul, everything will come. All

adversity will come, but it won't touch you, because nobody wants to pick a

fight with a powerful man. Therefore, the saying in hydrotherapy is, "shield

yourself." In hydrotherapy, they think that water is a fatherly shield,

paanee pitaa, and that anybody who can produce this shield that conquers the

coldness of the water can conquer death. That's what hydrotherapy is based

on. It's a very simple thing. If I, with my body, can conquer the chilliness

of the water, I can take away the chilliness of my life

 

Dear delicate and dedicated yogis and yoginis,

 

I have hesitated to report this because I don't want to offend anyone in this

group. Since I you continue to talk about cold showers, I will report my

experiment. I am so happy to have a pleasant cold shower, I just want to share

it with you in case any of you suffer from them the way I have. The following

report concerns the use of urine to increase warmth during the cold shower and

to generally warm the body. It works for me, a cold body type who sweats very

little.

 

For the past month several times a week, I scrubbed fresh urine (my own) into my

skin before my early morning cold shower. I do it squatting in the bathtub. I

scrub as a hair dresser-yogini, friend of mine advised to do. She was only

talking about my feet that do not exfoliate (they were crusted with dead skin).

Foot scrubbing with urine worked so well that I decided to do my whole body,

including my face. In continued to scrub my feet with a pumic stone and urine.

Urine is supposed to be good for warts and the two little ones that I had are

gone. I remember one day I ran my hand across the bottom of my foot and a hard

"grain of sand" like piece of skin crossed by fingertips. It was the center of

the old wart. After rubbing my skin with the urine, I wash with a spray of cold

water. This spray is quite pleasant. I am careful to leave the shower curtain

out of the bathtub when I am rubbing myself with urine. I get out and dry with

a towel. Then, I put on just a small amount of oil on my skin and really rubbed

it in (as instructed) My friend actually said wet your skin with slightly salty

water and then rub in the oil very well. Urine is salty and sterile so why not

use it? I have trouble sweating and probably this urine acts like sweat. I

drink it first thing in the morning and have been doing that for about two

years. In the morning it contains melatonin among many other benefits. So

anyway urine on my body feels very clean to me. Then, I take the cold shower

with pants on to protect my thighs. I rub myself hard with and then scrubbed

with a very rough brush ( not my face). Then I go in to the shower a number of

times rubbing and spraying different parts of my body. I swear I feel warm or

at least I am not jumping out of my skin the way I normally did prior to this

urine treatment. I feel that the cold water is pleasant. After that during

sadhana and throughout the day, I feel a warmth that I never felt even during

hot summer days.

 

Victory to the soul!! Survival for the body, at least until the next time

around!!

 

Sat Nam

Gian